Books cited in Zadie Smith's new essay collection, CHANGING MY MIND

(An incomplete list)

• Zora Neale Hurston, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD
• George Eliot, MIDDLEMARCH
• THE BBC TALKS OF E.M. FORSTER, 1929-1960
• Roland Barthes, "The Death Of The Author" and THE PLEASURE OF THE TEXT
• Kingsley Amis, "No More Parades"
• Vladimir Nabokov, LECTURES ON LITERATURE
• Louis Begley, THE TREMENDOUS WORLD I HAVE INSIDE MY HEAD: FRANZ KAFKA: A BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
• Franz Kafka, LETTER TO MY FATHER
• Joseph O'Neill, NETHERLAND
• Tom McCarthy, REMAINDER

Giving thanks for reading that begets reading!

Reading on the Road: Giving thanks for paperbacks edition

In terms of surviving long flights and delays there is no better technology. Four of these are paperbacks, which is good enough:

Jonathan Miles, DEAR AMERICAN AIRLINES (already started, haven't had time to finish even though it is really short and debatably a waste of space)
Malcolm Gladwell, WHAT THE DOG SAW
James Dickey, TO THE WHITE SEA (Wrapped Up in Books)
Tom Mendocino, PROBATION (review)
Scott Rosenberg, SAY EVERYTHING: HOW BLOGGING BEGAN, WHAT IT'S BECOMING AND WHY IT MATTERS

I know, still too many, but I have two long travel days and this should help. (I'll be in the land of sketchy WiFi, although this blog will continue to magically write itself until I can find a signal.) If you're going somewhere for the holiday, what are you taking with you?

Photo: fabiovenni

I guess it could be a compliment...

If a critic writes of an author, "You don't read a novel by [author] so much as you give in to one... You read on to be free of it. You read on because you must," is she paying a compliment or giving him an expert backhand? You be the judge, because my feeling about this author is infecting my perspective.

Speaking of infecting, I'm still sick. I'm not a doctor but I'm pretty sure that it's the first recorded female case of Man Cold.

I don't have any court documents to back up this observation, but yesterday I saw James Frey at my favorite neighborhood brunch place. He probably just had coffee and called it brunch.

ETA: I'm super sick today, and I think we all know whose fault it is (although he likely had nohing to do with it). What else would you like to blame on James Frey?

Sesame Street Sunday

Lazyblogging, I know, but I just saw on Twitter that the Brooklyn Public Library is hosting a 40th-anniversary exhibit on the show which just opened last weekend. The show has been teaching kids to read for 40 years and the West Coast bureau and I can't be the only ones who have near-photographic memory (videographic?) of these snippets given how many people have tried to set them to rap songs and so on.

And now, a few favorite videos.

Bert and Ernie's rhyming game:


"Ma! There's an alligator in my room!"


The Yip Yips discover the telephone:


Cowboy X


Smokey Robinson being groped by the letter U (because even though I posted it before, it is just so unsettling and would never make it into a children's show today):

People who've gone diving in Yellowstone Lake say that there is a bulge in the floor that is now about 100 feet high and the whole thing is just sort of pulsing. From different people you get different answers, but it could go in another three to four thousand years or it could go on Thursday. No one knows.

--Cormac McCarthy gives one of his very few interviews (first one since Oprah? Maybe) to the Wall Street Journal and takes advantage of the opportunity to scare us all. Also covered: the real-life kid behind the kid, his own one-star review of MOBY DICK and one more pullquote of awesome:

I was at the Academy Awards with the Coens [for "No Country For Old Men"]. They had a table full of awards before the evening was over, sitting there like beer cans. One of the first awards that they got was for Best Screenplay, and Ethan came back and he said to me, "Well, I didn't do anything, but I'm keeping it."

How to make your best-of-decade list have no meaning

British newspaper The Times has come out with its 100 best of the noughties, and though I'm running dangerously low on processing power at this time in the week I scanned it and some of the choices were pretty interesting. Then I skipped to the top 11, which I will reprint here to save you from clicking through 17 gallery pages (gah, impression-happy designers; see the full list here). Editorial comments follow:

1. Cormac McCarthy, THE ROAD -- Somehow it has gotten out that I don't like this book. Untrue! I liked it, though not as much as NO COUNTRY... or BLOOD MERIDIAN.
2. Marjane Satrapi, PERSEPOLIS
3. Barack Obama, DREAMS FROM MY FATHER
4. Robert Bringhurst (trans.), MASTERWORKS OF THE HAIDA MYTHTELLERS -- I've never heard of this, but won't rule it out just for that reason.
5. Irène Némirovsky, SUITE FRANCAISE -- Own it, haven't read it -- is it worth the hype?
6. Malcolm Gladwell, THE TIPPING POINT
7. Yann Martel, LIFE OF PI -- Ooooooooverrated.
8. Margaret Atwood, PAYBACK: DEBT AND THE SHADOW SIDE OF WEALTH -- I didn't like it but I've seen it pop up on some other lists like this.
9. Ian McEwan, ATONEMENT
10. Dan Brown, THE DA VINCI CODE
11. Leo Tolstoy, WAR AND PEACE (trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

Sorry, what? I know I'm on record as declaring WAR AND PEACE overrated, and since I haven't read the new translation I can't speak to its greatness. (There's also a debate to be had over whether new translations count as new publications.) But this juxtaposition should never have been allowed to happen. I hope there was a big fight a dreadful row over that at the Times office, with people throwing around terms like "death of print."

(There ought to be a subset of Godwin's Law about that phrase and conversations about publishing, but naturally I'm not willing to donate my last name to it.)

To: HOLLY'S INBOX From: Ellen Subject: Re: The future of literature as we know it

When I heard someone had written a best-selling novel consisting of a series of e-mails, my first thought was, "This is going to be awesome." To the extent that people these days spend their lives on e-mail, it was about time that someone updated the 19th-century model of people sending letters back and forth to each other. (Not that people have stopped writing those; Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott's WHICH BRINGS ME TO YOU is a great recent novel-in-letters.) Such is the premise behind HOLLY'S INBOX -- using the conceit of all the different e-mails a person gets and sends in a day to draw a life and scoot the plot forward without any ancillary scenes.

The author apparently got the idea from reading a former employee's left-behind e-mails (note to self: delete everything), which he described to Entertainment Weekly as "gripping." It's too bad he didn't just copy and paste them into HOLLY'S INBOX, because this book was so, so slow. I would say it was too realistic, but the real inbox of a new receptionist with a slutty best friend, an in-office boyfriend and a secret dark past -- and no discretion about putting all of this on company e-mail -- would have to be more interesting.

As Pie Not Included pointed out, some of the exchanges are much more like IM conversations than proper e-mails and the story one character is telling is dragged out much longer than it would be in a proper e-mail exchange. Holly is a total twit who (spoiler) nearly loses her job over an unnecessary lie, but she's capable of writing multiple-paragraph e-mails.

Why did I finish this book if it was so boring? First, it accurately replicated several e-mail forms common to homo sapiens sapiens cubiculi -- the passive-aggressive assignment thread, the snarky response to the non-response, the thinly disguised code for bitching about superiors. Second, I held out hope that it would get better once Holly's secrets were revealed (didn't).

And third, it's rare I read a novel which I think is not good but which I also believe could and will be done better soon. (Either a lot of bad novels I come across are flawed in the fundamentals, or I don't look at them with a charitable enough eye.) When it got really dull I even started thinking, "I could have written this book." Of course I'm deluded, but you would be too; think about how many e-mails you send in a day! This book tops 650 pages but because the to/from fields are constantly repeated, it doesn't contain that much text. Grandstanding aside, it's a form I'm excited to see taking shape, if not this particular shape.

Internet high-five!

Blogger Evany insisted a librarian take a picture of her with her brand-new library card. I'm pretty sure it's what Jay-Z would do.

Your 2009 National Book Award Winners

Colum McCann won for his novel LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN; the nonfiction winner was T.J. Stiles for THE FIRST TYCOON: THE EPIC LIFE OF CORNELIUS VANDERBILT. Flannery O'Connor's collected stories garnered her the Best National Book Ever Award (not its official title). Epic prediction fail!

Also, Keith Waldrop, professor at the best school ever, took home the poetry prize, and YA honors went to Philip Hoose's CLAUDETTE COLVIN: TWICE TOWARD JUSTICE, about an African-American woman who refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus a year before Rosa Parks did.

To be discussed:
1. Does embracing the biography of a rich entrepreneur mean America's animosity towards captains of industry has ended?
2. The buzz on the YA category was whether David Small's STITCHES should have been included in that category or was more properly an adult book. Should publisher W.W. Norton be kicking itself? Why or why not?
3. Will Thomas Pynchon ever come out now after this epic snub?

You Too Can Be A Romance Novelist (For $599)

Harlequin announced it will open a new imprint called Harlequin Horizons for self-publishing projects. The 60-year-old publisher is teaming with Author Solutions to give both general self-publishing clients and rejectees from Harlequin imprints the chance to carry the romance publisher's name -- por dinero. Packages start at $599 and go up to $1,599, which will get you 25 free copies, a close edit of the first chapter "or 1700 words" and a "book signing kit" containing bookmarks and posters.

I have read some self-published books, and as you would expect some are good enough to blend in seamlessly at your local literature purveyor and some are error-ridden meandering nightmares. (Hint to self-publishers out there: At least make sure your protagonist has the same name throughout the book. Yes, that happened.) I know of at least one self-published author among those whose next book went to a major publisher, and hey, good for him.

But if I were a Harlequin author I'd be pretty depressed about the cheapening of the brand at its lower end. Regardless of what you think of their normal output -- of which I have read nothing -- the gap between being paid to publish and paying is still important in terms of what readers and other authors expect from you. Harlequin top brass may have thought it wasn't quite so important as making money, but as covered before, romance isn't feeling the recession like the rest of publishing.

Not to get all Snooty McHighbrowpants here, but the most I know about these books comes from the protagonist of LADY ORACLE who writes historical romances in secret -- a very funny subplot, if likely unrealistic.

New York Public Library: Judgy

I think there are more doubters in the world than gymnasts, but what do I know.

This is way better than vampire Darcy

Book A Week With Jen got the following in the mail:
But wait, it gets better! This is the fourth in a series of books about a Latino P.I. who became a vampire while serving in Iraq. That's right, a Latino veteran vampire P.I. -- if I'm putting those modifiers in the correct order, which I suspect I am not. It's as if the author had character dice he threw up in the air to create this guy, which means the world will never know about his Asian-American mattress salesman who was bitten by a werewolf in his old job as a postal worker.

The other books in the series, since you're dying to know now, are THE NYMPHOS OF ROCKY FLATS, X-RATED BLOODSUCKERS and THE UNDEAD KAMA SUTRA. Here's the author's book trailer for JAILBAIT ZOMBIE. It's SFW but may leave you totally speechless:

Straw Poll Tuesday: My library, your library

If you live with other people, do you or have you comingled your books?

I have with roommates before, although I don't now because we don't have a communal bookshelf. (Since both of my roommates are grad students, I think it would be pretty easy to separate most of theirs from most of mine, and I trust them on the rest.) Throughout most of college my roommate and I were each issued our own bookshelf, but one year we shared a sweet built-in bookshelf; it was still inadequate, but it looked stylish.

I like to think if I were married or cohabitating I would gladly oversee the merging of the libraries, but I haven't been either so I don't know. Anne Fadiman has a funny essay in her collection EX LIBRIS: CONFESSIONS OF A COMMON READER about what happened when she and her husband combined their collections, a task they put off until they had been married for five years and had a child. That seems absurd to me, but maybe she was just really busy, or moving around a lot.

Two notes on memoir

"I will never write a book memoir unless something really interesting happens to me which is not likely."
--Ben Yagoda, author of the new book MEMOIR: A HISTORY, tempting fate or being honest in an interview with Reuters. Yagoda's ABOUT TOWN: THE NEW YORKER AND THE WORLD IT MADE is excellent reading, and this looks good too, although I imagine his publishers wouldn't have let him call it MEMOIR: A MEMOIR.

"Memoir is the Barbie of literary genres. It exaggerates the assets and invites the reader into an intimate alternative world, sometimes complete with a dream house. We hungrily buy and read memoir even as we express contempt for it. Memoirs are confessional and subversive; memoirs drop names. Memoirs print whispered secrets on their covers in 24-point type. Memoir is so much the genre of our time that sophisticated readers look for memoirs in fiction, hunting for clues to the “real story” with a fervent appetite for details of the writer’s real life."

--Susan Cheever, memoirist in review of Mary Karr's memoir LIT, NYT